I just wanted to say thank you so much for this it was much needed. and i have absolutely zero skills when it comes to creating anything. i actually attempted making tattoos before i even used the pattern tool. I have had wonderful results for tribal and colors. unfortunately some of the designs i attempted were too fine of lines so in game parts disappeared. i think and may be wrong but that problem could probably be fixed if it was possible to have the file larger than 512x512 but i dont know. i tried this a while back and wanted to leave a comment but spaced and life took over. maybe if i get back into it i'll upload some once i get screen shots.thanks again.

I'm working on Tattooinator now and one of the things I want to do is allow different size images. But - the game sizes the image down and my feeling is that the problem is in the scaling. If you notice, in general the smaller a tattoo is sized in CAS, the worse it looks. It might actually be better to use a smaller image that doesn't have to be scaled so much.

THANK YOU!!! Thank you so so much for posting this! Great, easy to follow instructions! Thank You!!!

Here is my first "Custom" Sims 3 Tattoo!


Image for tattoo 'base' found at Google Image Search.

Very nice!!!

Ok so I am sort of illiterate when it comes to computers and GIMP.

I have gotten this far [IMG]panda[/IMG]


which is basically the second step of pasting the image.

I do not know what the next step is because I don't really understand layers and background.


i understand if you are not up to the task of helping but if you can i would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you

In Gimp, you need to anchor pasted layers to normal ones, for them to become normal. I don't really understand why is that so (for example, why can't pasted layers be normal additional layers already?). Oh well, here's what you have to do..

1) In Layers toolbar: right click on Pasted Layer -> Anchor Layer
2) Then at the top of the window Colors -> Invert
3) Colors -> Colorify... and choose red

This would make Pandas red in picture, and that gives you one color tattoo. You can check Channels (near Layers), to see, what values have different channels. Don't forget to fix the Alpha channel. In the end, for one color picture, you will want your alpha channel to be black, and your image in Gimp will be fully transparent.

Gimp is kind of tricky.. I have played with Photoshop before, had no problems there, but gimp... You have to learn it :D. So if there are any questions, be free to ask.


As for my little "project". Well, tried little bit more tuning, yet the results weren't satisfactory. On the other hand, if we had 5 channels... But I guess that is also set in stone by EA? I'm sorry, CmarNYC, but I just don't know, what is the actual protocol of these tattoos, and whether it would be possible to push it a bit in some areas. And I'm completely unaware, how you built your tool :]. I am very curious about your ideas of bigger resolution pictures, and tuning in tattoonator - does it provide us with something, I can't achieve on my programming levels? (I'm sorry, if I haven't expressed myself clear here, I'm quite tired, and non-native English speaker).

Considering resolution of images, I had a very small off-centered tattoo (I hate the blunt symmetry, and central-ness in default format). That tattoo looked really nice and cute, had no problems with it. So I would speculate, that xxxpinkglampyr might have problems with transparency, not resolution. Sadly, I've deleted that tattoo (since it was done with TSR Workshop), so no screenshot ;/. So that's another thing, that's bothering me - can we have bigger non-centered tattoos?

I found myself wishing for 5 channels too! If we had the three color channels plus a channel for black and a channel for white, blending in tattoo images would be a lot more feasible. Unfortunately IMO that's not going to happen. Also unfortunately the game does what it does and that's to layer the channels on top of each other. Not that that's really a bad thing; in real life most tattoos are done using solid colors.

Protocol of the tattoos - the game tattoos are all 512x512 as far as I know. The channels are layered on top of the skin tone in order: red, then green, then blue, then alpha. Alpha is treated the same as the color channels. The intensity of the color is used as a multiplier in a similar way that the alpha is normally used as a transparency multiplier. For each pixel:

temp = Red[skin] * ((255 - Rchannel) / 255) + (Red[PresetR] * (Rchannel / 255))
temp = temp * ((255 - Gchannel) / 255) + (Red[PresetG] * (Gchannel / 255))
temp = temp * ((255 - Bchannel) / 255) + (Red[PresetB] * (Bchannel / 255))
Image red = temp * ((255 - Achannel) / 255) + (Red[PresetA] * (Achannel / 255))

Same for green and blue. PresetR, etc., are the red, green, blue, and alpha values for the preset colors. Yeah, it's confusing. Every time I look at that calculation it takes me a few minutes to figure out what the heck I did.

The tattoo maximum areas are fixed by the setup of the tattoo, if that's what you're asking about.

My new version of Tattooinator is almost ready. It basically reduces the green and blue to balance blended colors, and optionally transfers either the black or white to the alpha, automatically adds an alpha, and optionally makes white the background (transparent).

So, this tool is super awesome, downloaded it this morning and haven't actually come off it all day (weeee! creating things!) Anyhow, after about six or seven tattoo's made, with lots of ecstatic giggles, I realised I hadn't a clue how to make simple one-coloured tattoo's. Now, the kind of thing I want is for instance a fully recolourable chinese symbol - here's the tricky part, I can't seem to do it without some sort of border, which isn't what I want. >.< I know, I'm picky. But if anyone has an idea of how to make the whole tattoo one colour, so that I can simply choose a colour and the whole thing will be that colour without~ needing a border, that'd be super :3

That's actually pretty easy - color your symbol solid red with a black background, and add a solid black (non-transparent) alpha. Enable only the red channel and set up the preset colors for the red channel and you're done. If you're already doing that and seeing a border it may be that the black background is blending with your red symbol at the edges when you use the fill tool - I'm not sure how to get around that except by maybe doing the background first and then pasting your red symbol on it.

Well, I downloaded this to try and make this drawing I did some days ago
http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/2715/10911165.png
into a tattoo for my sims, but I can't do it!
The highlight look like shadows. I guess its because the layers with some redish tones and highlight have little opacity, so they make a mix with the red on the base.

Have you prepared your image for tattoos? Basically you need to distinguish different colour regions. For example: make the character skin red (as pure, as possible), outlines green, and highlights blue. You could use alpha for other type of highlights (for example: pink->blue, white->alpha), or make it completely black (that turns your image into 100% transparent in gimp).

If you are as heavy layers user, as I am, while painting, and haven't discarded them, that should be fairly easy to do. I've tried doing quick messy port, but screwed up with to dark blues (so they were transparent).. :]

As for CmarNYC, I'm very eager to see, what you're going to cook up!

EDIT:
Redid the ugly quick port of your tattoo.

This is how it looks in RGB (no alpha used):


This is how it looks in Tattooinator after applying (a bit random) colours:

Obviously, the quality is very low, but I hope they serve as an appropriate example . Good luck!

I used a (now outdated) beta of the new Tattooinator Convert on it, and if you change the preset colors to light red, light green, and light blue it looks halfway decent. The converted image is attached. Tonight when I'm home I'll upload the new Tattooinator which should do a better job, and if you and anyone else who wants to could play with it and report any problems I'd appreciate it.

Edit: Added a preview. I like your quick and dirty conversion, Qwxas - the colors are vivid without the darkening effect I've been unable to avoid with the convert function.

Edit # 2: Uploaded beta of Tattooinator with Convert function. It'll take any image size up to 1024 x 1024 as long as it's square.

Ah, excellent, thankyou! I was almost there, just didn't realise about making the alpha completely black >.<

Ah, I'm caught up in stuff again, so I'll check new tattooinator later. From the image you have provided, I see, that you're removing transparency completely (is it side effect of balancing, or intentional?). Also, I've tried AnnTat in older tattooinator few days ago, and few questions popped up: what colours am I supposed to use? Bright red, green and blue? Then the overall tattoo looks grayscale, not like your image.

I'll pop in later, the interest is still very much alive

Thanks! I need to do a lot more testing myself, but have been busy with another project.

I'm not sure why you say transparency is removed - black areas in the tattoo are transparent and the convert function will optionally convert a white background to black, making it transparent. The alpha is not used for transparency except in the sense that black in the alpha (which may show as checkerboard or maybe even white depending on your graphics program) is transparent.

For AnnTat and most blended or photo images, light red, green, and blue seem to give the best effect. It's not perfect by any means. The main use for the convert may be to make it easy for people who don't want to work with the alpha to convert a four-color image to a tattoo - it works best with pure colors and will add an alpha for you.

Hey, so, I've been messing around today with beta. First, I really love the preset switching buttons! Great addition . What I meant about removing transparency, was that blended blue-ish "tails" in original image are filled up with white, but after some thinking, I see it is very reasonable, so my remark was non-needed .

Despite it being dedicated to do a simple alpha channel addition, it actually does a fairly good job in photo conversion :D. My kittens:

Pure black to transparent, white to alpha (black skin):


Pure white to transparent, black to alpha (bright skin):


I'm not sure, how you achieve this with Red-Green-Blue, since I assumed layers work in subtractive way, and RGB is additive, but it's awesome :D. I'll study your formulas a bit more.

Here a question popped up for me: why are you using "Convert color to transparent" and "Color to alpha" dialogs? Aren't they a bit redundant? I mean, with this setting (white -> transparent; white -> alpha), I get same effect as with "black -> transparent; white -> alpha".


Also, I noticed a bug, that layout in tattoo preview depends on the filename length:
3 letters + .dds:


10 letters + .dds:


Ridiculously long default tattoo name (as extracted with TSR Workshop):


Then I've done multiple tests, because had some problems with white -> transparency conversion, but as now I've understood, I've used older beta version for that :D. After briefly checking the newer one, that conversion is ok, and the name problem is still there.

I'm going to play with it more, then check things in game. I hope you don't mind long image-rich posts :D. Thank you for this tool.

EDIT: actually, it looks, like white -> transparency problem persists ( I might have been using the same version after all, I'm a bit confused now ). So I'll just show my test results:

This is the basic test image:


I've written down on all colors, what channels are present. T means, that some transparency is observed. Skin is pink.

Conversion white -> transparent; black -> alpha:

As you can see, white -> transparent doesn't happen :/

Conversion black -> transparent; white -> alpha:

All fine here.

Conversion white -> transparent; white -> alpha yields same results, as black -> trasnparent; white -> alpha.

Conversion black -> transparent; black -> alpha:

Same result, as white -> transparent; black -> alpha, only pure black is really transparent.

So, in conclusion, white -> transparent seems not to work (although for a moment I though it did :/). I'll attach one of my dds'es, if by any chance they are causing it.

That's really remarkable! Better than any of the photo conversions I did. I haven't done as much testing as I should, but you may find that adjusting the transparency of the tattoo in CAS - making it completely opaque - may help with the dimming effect with lighter skins.



Basically I did reverse masking - reduced the amount of green by the amount of red in each pixel, and reduced the amount of blue by both the red and the green. This unfortunately makes the whole tat dimmer with blended colors.



Well, the choices to use black or white (or neither) for transparency is independent of the choice to use black or white (or neither) for the alpha. White -> transparent; white -> alpha makes no sense - I did code to automatically compensate for a user doing an inappropriate combination but of course it may not work perfectly. You may have seen the same effect because the 'white -> transparent' part was ignored and/or because your photo, like most photos, has no really pure black or white to convert to transparency.



That is REALLY weird. I didn't see that effect while testing, but did see some overlapping of buttons. Will check it out.

Thanks so much for the testing and the very helpful feedback!

Saw your edit just now - here's what I get with your image using white -> transparent, black -> alpha. Seems to work fine, so I'm confused. Unfortunately I have to leave for work now - will take another look tonight.

That is really odd. I'm not sure, which version of Tattooinator I should be using. All my tests were done with v1.1 patched with exe from #115 post. Now I see, that downloads contain v2, which is a bit different. Yet I get the same result - white -> transparent doesn't happen :/. It seems, that for me white is not being recognized as pure white.

EDIT: attached converted dds, maybe that gives you any hints.

I think I know what happened. Your original image is compressed using DXT5 - by its nature compression makes the colors not quite pure and the conversion didn't recognize the white background. When I did it this morning, for some reason I don't remember I first opened the file in GIMP and saved it with no compression. (Obviously Tattooinator is not as smart as GIMP and doesn't recover the original colors as well.) I mentioned this in my tutorial for Tattooinator Convert - don't know if you read that. I really should put a warning in the conversion program so it'll tell the user there's a possible problem if they're opening a compressed file.

Where shall I put the package file?

Put a tattoo package in the same place as any other custom content package. If you're not familiar with how to install custom packages, the help section has information: http://www.modthesims.info/wiki.php...g_Package_Files

Ugh, my brain hurts. I'll leave the beautiful tattoos to you and the laziness to me. I am not worthy.

Here be my first try, I always wanting a tattoo of this logo and finally got it I think it did a good job. x]

The edges aren't as rounded as I would've liked them, just make thicker edges... or?